


Cold: A SHIELD Codex Halloween

by KhamanV



Series: The SHIELD Codex: Judicium [12]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Cryptids, Gen, Halloween, Mild Horror, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:41:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27212851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KhamanV/pseuds/KhamanV
Summary: Called to investigate what he assumes will be another meaningless Scooby-Doo scenario, Loki enlists biologist Jemma Simmons on his quest to see if the Mothman has been pestering a Pennsylvanian city.
Series: The SHIELD Codex: Judicium [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1137035
Comments: 29
Kudos: 45





	1. Scully

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gentler Halloween offering. There are some moments of tension and one ghost story, with the finale based around a large-scale incident with no major amounts of death or gore described or faced. 2020 is all the horror movie we need, so instead, we're going for something a *little* more Karloff camp, with a couple of cute flashbacks to a very young Loki.
> 
> As is also common for most Halloweenie Codex fics, this one is mostly standalone. Loki is an agent of SHIELD, and Jemma Simmons is a beloved biologist from the TV series. Together they fight... well, not crime. Mostly Loki's ingrained cynicism.

**Cold: A SHIELD Codex Halloween**

_“When convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?” ~ The X-Files_

_. . ._

1\. Scully

. . .

“They first saw the purported ‘creature’ in the mid ‘60s, there in Point Pleasant. Two men, digging a fresh grave in the local cemetery late at night, which I’m sure _never_ leaves your febrile human minds open to wild ideas.” Loki kept his hands in the pockets of his black hoodie, not looking back to see the expression SHIELD Agent Jemma Simmons had on her face. He watched pixel-small traffic come and go along Pittsburgh’s West End Bridge instead, shards of rusted steel left at the edge of the river kicked along by his hard-toe shoes. A sign leaned nearby, informing long-gone residents to ‘dial before you dig.’ “Something flew up from the trees and disappeared into the nighttime sky. Huge and dark in their telling, and it frightened them badly.

“A few days later, at least two young couples gone into the lonesome, polluted dark of these old woods, seeking places to court privately, came back with their ardor dashed yet their adrenaline wholly jolted. They claimed to have been chased by something powerful enough to keep up with their vehicles. Your usual stammered tales of bumpy things in the night, red eyes and broad wings that cut through the sky. So on it went, a handful of interesting stories of such encounters in the woods. And then, winter, 1967. The Silver Bridge falls, taking dozens of human lives with it. The stories burn again. Had the creature somehow known, this thing they began to call the Mothman? Was its appearance a warning? Ink is spilled by the gallon, and not a few curious folks get their money writing dubious tracts about the creature. So it goes, and now they’ve an annual festival for the silly thing, there in the town where it happened. It’s a nice statue, anyway. Appropriately gaudy.”

Agent Simmons finished carefully plucking the tiny grey feathers from a ruined girder, some unrecognizable artifact of the city’s steel age, and shook her head. “Was it, you think? A creature bringing strange warnings?”

“It was a sandhill crane,” said Loki, with the sort of cruel bluntness a touchy substitute teacher might use to pick on a child. “Maybe an owl, once or twice, but they’re _your_ damn birds and you humans _still_ can’t keep it in mind how damned big a ruddy crane is when they reach full wing spread. It was out of its normal migration and looked odd to nighttime eyes. Frightened imagination did the rest.”

Simmons puffed a sigh as she closed the cap of her sample tube, straightening the rest of the way up and rubbing her dirty palms clean on her windbreaker. “You know. It’s a little depressing to get to leave the grounds for the first time in a goodly while with our resident sorcerer, and then only get to hear about how mundane the local legends are.”

Loki didn’t turn around, but the tone of his voice changed, relenting. “It’s a paradoxical-seeming habit, it’s ingrained early in most disciplines. Do you know what the _single_ most important detail is when using magic? Above all else, the heart of every form of sorcery, necromancy, elementalism, anything you could possibly imagine?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Efficiency.” He turned his head at her surprised laugh. “I’m quite serious. The cost of every spell or illusion is carefully calculated well before the first whisper of a word of power or flick of a finger. You want the right result for the investment of your will, if not some extra value. And to pay too dear is to burn out. More than one sorcerer has lost their life and their soul playing foolish games with the costs of magic. Far more.”

“You don’t make it look that way sometimes.” _A lot of times_. She decided to be diplomatic.

“ _Ah_.” Loki turned the rest of the way and allowed a slight bow, the smooth gesture of the consummate showman. “Of course, one of _my_ favored disciplines is illusion. And so my calculations must include what I _want_ others to see - and make their assumptions of my skill accordingly.” He offered her one of his quick, fangy smiles. “I assure you, efficiency still matters to me very much. There is good value in presentation, and worth careful investment.”

She shrugged. “True, you do quite like to explain the costs of things like illusions and veils versus invisibility. It’s a similar conversation, then.”

“Precisely. Now, let me ask you this also - if _you_ were a multi-dimensional alien creature of vast knowledge and prophecy, strange of shape and purpose, would _you_ faff around West Virginia, of all unholy places, trying to warn the villagers of some, in grander global context, minor disaster?” He gestured vaguely at the riverside wreckage surrounding them, as if it were representing all such possible wastelands.

Simmons patted her pocket, where the mysterious grey feathers would be safe until she got back to her portable lab kit. “It’s about as likely as a dimension-hopping alien of vast knowledge and shifting purpose sorting through a wrecked old steel mill because someone told him they thought they saw something weird in the city last week, isn’t it?”

Loki narrowed his eyes at her, the rest of his expression still mild. “I hate that you have a point.”

She smiled brightly up at him, knowing that was as close to a graceful loss as he would permit.

. . .

Five reports had made their way to SHIELD, all along a similar theme, all of them printed up, stapled up, and slipped into a two dollar manila folder to be left on an old sorcerer’s desk that ate up the increasingly bizarre corner of the library. Loki found it the next morning, bemused. It was a game Dispatch had started to play with him. The more nonsensical or flat out bonkers something was, the more dramatically it was delivered to the ‘director’ of SHIELD’s magical investigative wing. All of it a parody of pop culture superspies. He was amused by this new ritual, not that he would admit it, and left the folder there until he’d gone and gotten himself a properly fuckoff huge mug of coffee.

He required rituals of his own. The caffeine would ease the headache he was about to catch from whatever nonsense had come his way this time. If it were ‘normal’ levels of weird or at least came from a sensible source, he would have gotten the report with the proper morning batch.

Therefore he was not surprised by five increasingly creaky reports of _something_ in the skies over Western Pennsylvania, vast black shapes skimming through the skies with glints of red buried within some stocky torso. One had a ‘helpful’ drawing attached. Loki was angrily aware of the meme about the leprechaun police sketch and only discipline kept him from immediately playing wastebasket soccer with the useless printout. He’d kept it, after all, once he finished reading the appended report.

Of all the red herrings that came Loki’s way, he hated cryptids the most.

By a considerable margin.

Cryptids, as he would later begin explaining to Agent Simmons, were almost always the most mundane shit ginned up into something else by a frightened mind. The Jersey Devil? Bears with mange. Sightings of a chupacabra? Fox with mange. Something weird mutilated your cow? Nature was just like that sometimes.

Loki was _still_ mad about the time he’d been sent after a _tulpa_ , because at least that suggested an actual magical practitioner might be goofing around. But no. It was a homeless person in Europe that needed support and healthcare, not the local children acting like he was some horrifying ghast. The last update he’d gotten from the country’s health care services said that poor fellow was doing better, which he supposed he did care about, if privately.

Pennsylvania’s would-be creature had been immediately cross-referenced in the report by Dispatch with the Mothman of West Virginia. Geographically, he supposed, it made a certain amount of sense. Pittsburgh was a scant couple of hours from its original territory, and another appended report suggested humans had seen the damned thing as far away as Chicago just in the last couple of years. Allegedly, of course.

The memo appended by Dispatch also made sure to amplify some whole thing about bridges. Loki found that confusing at first - hells did he know about these lesser human cities? - until some stray PR piece about the city that forced itself onto his browser when making hotel arrangements called Pittsburgh the city of bridges. The most bridges in one city, what human industry.

He didn’t know what to do with that information. What, the Mothman was heralding the fall of every one of the more than four hundred ruddy bridges in town the way it had done for Point Pleasant? Doubtful. More birds, and a city on edge for various sociopolitical reasons.

The rules of his own charter within SHIELD said it deserved to be checked out. Fine, then. He’d visit yet another generic metropolis on their dime, and probably end up doing little else but updating the Audubon Society on new migration patterns. He’d attach Simmons to the job. The biologist hadn’t gotten to see much biology in its natural state lately, he doubted she’d begrudge the fresh air. And she seldom minded his occasionally terse company.

It wouldn’t be a _vacation_ , but it might substitute.

. . .

Loki finished stomping along the edge of the Monongahela River, glancing across it without any real interest at the park situated in the triangular tip of the city. Two reports were fully useless. Two others painted a trail along this patch of ruined industrial sector, and they’d now spent the bulk of their first morning in the city picking out feathers for the sake of effort and looking for potential lairs or whatever the hells this alleged cryptid might doze in. He held no great hopes for the last report’s territory, but it would wait for a decent lunch. “No further _evidence,_ Miss Simmons?”

“You don’t have to sound sarcastic about it.”

“May I sound as if I’ve seen several dozen pigeons with compellingly familiar grey feathers eye my shoulders with something nigh approaching lust in the last hour alone?”

“That’s a fair observation, I admit.”

“I’m a target, a good one. I’m the sturdiest thing going along the edge of these waters, and I spent half an hour getting the flerken hair off this jacket. My mere presence mocks the gods. Should I linger here overlong, I will meet the same fate of all grand structures before the modest bird and their eager digestive systems. What was this, anyway? Yet another steel mill?”

“I expect.” Simmons looked at the same park he did, smiling at the fountain happily blurbing at the place where the two rivers split. “Seltzer water gets bird poo right out.”

“I’ll jot that down,” droned Loki, giving the pigeon landing three feet away from his boot a baleful stare. The bird looked back up at him without a single fuck to give. “Shoo.”

Simmons glanced at the bird, amused by its bravery, then up the wide hillside where a warehouse had once stood. There was a shadow on the wreckage, and she peered at it until she recognized the shape throwing it from the lee of some ruined steel. Another person was here. Perhaps a scavenger, looking for copper or other useful leavings.

She looked away after a moment, watching Loki’s standoff progress. She had no doubt he was fully aware that there was someone nearby. For all of Loki’s reputation, she and the other agents knew that, these days, one of the safest places on Earth was behind him. “He’s offering a first-hand report.”

“I don’t speak bird and I am not going to start today.” The pigeon took off. He turned to her, his left boot braced on a girder half-buried in the stony dirt. “We’ve done enough here. There’s the sighting near the fort to investigate - _later_. We’ve earned a pleasant lunch. There ought be something decent downtown.”

“Could ask the locals,” she teased, not bothering to look back for their shadowed visitor. Might even be some remnant of a security team on behalf of whoever owned the land here.

“There’s no one around this blasted landscape but us, Agent Simmons,” said Loki, and the authority in his voice gave her a chill. Now she looked for the figure again, and found no one. Loki followed her gaze up the hillside. “What?”

“You didn’t sense them?”

He furrowed his brow, then shook his head. His usual air of noble annoyance slipped and his voice took on genuine concern. “Jemma?”

She pointed to where the shadow had been. “There was someone there. I saw them, their shadow at first, anyway. Tall, slender, like a man would be, but doubt he was as tall as you.”

“I’d have sensed them,” said Loki, gently.

“I know! That’s why I didn’t bother worrying about it. But I _saw_ them.” She went to move up the hill, though the amount of rubble between her and the ruined warehouse would be a challenge. She stopped when Loki touched her arm. “I swear to you, I did. Don’t tell me it was nothing.”

“I won’t. You think you saw something, then you did.” He was cautious now, peering at the ruined structure. “Yet I find nothing there.” He half-lidded his eyes, considering. “Do you want us to take a closer look?”

Jemma looked away, beginning to doubt herself. If Loki genuinely hadn’t sensed anyone, then… “No. No… perhaps it _was_ just a shadow. Or they were here too briefly to catch your radar and weren’t any sort of threat anyway. Something like that.” She looked up into his face, which held no judgement or irritation with her, which was somehow just as annoying, but only because she was wholly irritated with herself instead. “Lunch, then. Clear our heads. All right?”

“Of course,” said Loki, and let Simmons take lead on the path back towards the rented car. But before he followed, he watched the place she’d pointed at, and marked it well. Just in case.

Loki had been granted pointed lessons about being proven wrong. He had always been a fast learner. Perhaps he would check this place again. Perhaps they might not need to. He set it aside, and considered more pressing matters instead. Like food. On the company’s dime.


	2. Snake

2\. Snake

. . .

_Ago ~_

It would be accurate to call the younger of Asgard’s two princes ‘precocious,’ thought the harried librarian currently in charge of certain initial studies assigned to them both. It was also an elegant way to massively understate the point.

The boy was seven. The librarian, whose name was Thyra, prayed she would be assigned to some distant archive by the time he was seventeen. It wasn’t that he was cruel or some tyrannical burden - far from it! Prince Loki was a quick-witted and polite delight of a boy, with a scholar’s handwriting that put his less-interested older brother to shame. Not that Thor was a fool, he simply preferred activity to his sturdy desk and it came through in his scrabbly letters.

It was that Loki didn’t stop. He was exhausting. He was a dervish of questions at _all times_ (she questioned his need for sleep, and also if he was already using his mother’s magic to sneak into the kitchen’s sugar stores), and the sole blessing was that he was already well past his age in reading ability, so Thyra could find temporary rescue by fobbing him off with some books. When he was done, however, his list of questions had expanded. Exponentially.

Tradition dictated that the royal children would blossom under one teacher’s guidance for scholastic studies for a handful of years, until they entered a more structured program that would include other activities, including weaponsmastery and other such necessities. Until then, Thyra, first daughter of the Royal Archivist, a man skilled with both blade and pen, was honored with the great responsibility of tending this little garden. Honored. Thankfully, as befit that honor, she could also afford the _good_ wine.

(Imposter syndrome is not something one assumes exists in Asgardian society, however, this young woman was barely in her seventh century and had been handed a massive amount of ‘whatever you do, don’t fuck this up’ in regards to not one but two princes of the Royal House of Asgard and if it didn’t already exist, poor Thyra would have invented it.)

Today they were working on the entanglement of myth, prophecy, and history of Asgard. It was supposed to be a _terrific_ bit of schoolwork, a real popper among other young students who loved how fantastical the segment was. The young prince had found a sticking point, and was having none of her waffling. “Asgard is like an asteroid,” said the seven year old, those sharp green eyes fixed relentlessly on her weary ones. “With all its rocks and roots and whatnot poking out the bottom, right? It’s not a… a…” He began to visibly grasp for the right word.

Protocol dictated she give Loki a moment to figure it out for himself. To _blossom_ , reminded her documents, though right now the poor child looked like he was trying to grab a fish with his bare hands. She waited patiently, her hands folded atop Velvek Antharm’s Grand Bestiary of Ragnarok, and within its pages inky creatures writhed between runewords.

“Spheroid!” said Loki, triumphant.

“That’s correct, Your Highness.” This part was going okay so far. “We live upon a unique planetary structure, and both great magic and technology keep us aloft among the stars.”

His eyes darted to the book in her hands, and then back up to her face. “But there’s no place for Jormungandr to actually live.” She opened her mouth and he barreled on. “It’s supposed to be the biggest snake ever. So either it’s wrapped around the roots of the whole world - and it isn’t, ‘cause Father’s got patrols going around all of Asgard all the time and I’m sure nobody’s ever seen it or we’d have heard - or it’s in the water coiling around all of Asgard, and there’s… just not enough water for anything that impressive.”

“Your Highness,” she started, looking for solid ground. “Some of our tales say it waits for its time in the vast oceans of Midgard.”

“Midgard.” The little boy considered that. “But it’s supposed to go all around. You’d see traces of it. That’s just a human world, they don’t even hardly have any magic.”

“The beast is magical enough all on its own.” She tried to keep the defeat out of her voice.

“You’d _sense_ traces of it!”

Thor yawned, daydreaming about whatever it was pre-teen boys daydreamed about in Asgard.

“Perhaps it exists beyond our mortal magic.”

Loki stared up at her in open defiance. “Mother would know about it. And she’s never said anything about a giant snake.”

“Perhaps it is a mystery that must wait for older days.” Thyra almost slapped herself in the face at the accidental implication of puberty she’d just left right out there on the table, but settled for a blink so hard it was almost audible.

“I’ll ask her, but I bet there’s no snake like that. And if Jormungandr doesn’t exist, then all the other stuff about Ragnarok doesn’t work, either.” Loki’s face hardened over, but since he was seven and still made up of mostly babyfat and stolen sugar treats, it wasn’t exactly an intimidating look.

Seven years old is an early age to become a diehard cynic, but Loki was, to reuse the word, _precocious as hell_.

Thyra gave it one more good ol’ academic try. “Sometimes, Your Highness, there are things that exist despite the facts we think we know.”

“Then the facts are wrong and we have more to learn.” He crossed his arms and seemed to withdraw within himself, thinking. “Learning should never stop. Maybe that’s the right lesson.”

Thor snored so hard he woke himself up. “Whu?”

So, the monsters of the end times were a big hit in the royal palace, one autumnal afternoon.

. . .

Jemma studied the gastropub’s menu with a scientist’s clinical mask hiding her dawning horror, calculating sodium, saturated fats, potentially carcinogenic traces… she wasn’t a full vegetarian, but this was a _lot_. Her gaze kept returning to the pub’s signature plate, the tomahawk ribeye. As if on cue, an example of the dish floated through the dining room. Almost three pounds of meat still lodged on its Flintstones-style jutting bone. She blurted, despite herself. “Oh my god.”

Loki watched the dish go by with an expression that said it looked oddly familiar. “Now _that_ is the flavor of home,” he said, bemused and possibly a little surprised. “Ye gods, put a drunk, off-key bard in the corner and they could advertise an authentic Asgardian experience for mortals. Leave your sword at the door, but the eating knife is fine.”

“I always take you for a daintier eater, Loki, the one with a silver knife and fork when everyone else at the table goes barbarian.”

“Oh, I’ll eat my broccoli, Miss Simmons, and I’ll dab my mouth with a napkin just right. But when your culture - both of them, apparently - relies on their physical efforts, you end up requiring a lot of protein regardless of your table manners. And magic requires a fair amount of caloric input as well. A good steak is a good steak.”

“And I’m sure you were blessed with a godly metabolism from birth,” said Simmons, a mortal person of slight to moderate height, who was looking at three days worth of intake per plate. “On Earth that’s a superpower all on its own.”

“Oh, quit worrying about dietary numbers. It’s one meal.”

“I could be out with you for days on this.”

“And I’ll pick something slighter tomorrow. Or you will.” Loki jutted his chin at the table nearby and its proud monument to a very dead, very delicious cow. “Not to mention we’ve still got plenty of traipsing around the ruins ahead. The house special it is.”

“The cholesterol-“

“Won’t kill you overnight.”

She thought about arguing the point, then let it go. A hidden, primal part of her looked at that neighbor’s hock of meat with genuine interest. Her gaze flicked back to the menu, looking for something safe to have alongside. “All right.”

It was too late. “And the marrow appetizer.”

She gurgled a horrified laugh of despair.

. . .

Multiple generations of proud English ancestors faded away and instead one terribly hungry Neanderthal hooted in her ear, proud to know that her ancient DNA was at last steeped in enough joyous food to feed the entire tribe. Jemma kept her table manners, but she was holding her own on doing damage to the gigantic steak. Loki, if he noticed, and he undoubtedly did, politely left it without comment. She set her fork down for a moment, going for some water. “We’ve still got one area left from the reports, yes? What was that, a state park?”

He finished chewing before he answered, starting with a nod. “Yes, a bit further out, north of the city.” He cocked a wry look at her. “Osprey began returning to this bit of forest. They’re quite large, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

Jemma sighed. “Beautiful birds, though. If we see one, that’s still a win.”

“Quite. This alleged creature is apparently quite fond of nigh-abandoned and reclaimed wilderness. This is a bit more pure, but, well, I suppose this whole area is rather reclaimed from its industrial history. There’s nothing quite analogous to the fabled ‘TNT bunkers’ around here, but then, I’m not expecting consistency from a legend this thin.”

“I’ll have the results from the feathers we took from the riverside tested by the end of tonight.”

“Certainly.” He was about to resume eating, then paused. “Do you know, in all my years, I’ve never once had a so-called ‘cryptid’ pan out?” He sounded almost disappointed. Jemma doubted her ears. Until he spoke again, and this time it was unmistakeable. “I thought Earth, of all places, might be a good source for such odd mysteries, since I keep underestimating it. And yet, nothing. Ghosts, yes, and demonic things, and other oddities besides. But nothing that stirs new questions about nature itself. Nothing truly strange.”

She couldn’t help staring at him. “You actually _want_ to find one? I thought you were always just annoyed by the very idea of it all.”

“Oh, I _am_ annoyed.” Loki gave a small, dour laugh. “I’ve been annoyed since I was a child and my first teacher - a very nice lady, I must clarify, and I hope she is well - tried to teach us about our own mythos and it all fell apart when I looked too closely at it. Well, if anything should be a disappointment, I suppose Ragnarok _would_ be the best choice for a wet raspberry.”

“Ragnarok…”

“Oh, the Fenris wolf is real. But only real in the sense that a would-be warrior queen of ill repute stole a direwolf cub from Jotunheim, named it for the legend, and raised it to terrify ally and enemy alike. The great snake, Jormungandr? Not so much.” He smiled at a stray piece of food left on his plate. “Believe me, I did my homework.” A smaller chuckle. “Well, as much as a seven-year-old can muster, anyway.”

. . .

Mother tried to let him down with the same musings of possibility that Lady Thyra had used, but she was too wise and too clinical to blatantly lie to young Loki’s face about the topic. Oh, there was some vague possibility left, sure, but the truth waited in the rest of the details. Father’s patrols had never seen a grand snake, as he’d guessed. Mother and he had an interesting chat about the sheer depths and mystery of Midgard’s waters, though. Loki had been wrong about that, there was _plenty_ of water on tiny Midgard, and he’d listened with horrified awe to Frigga about its black depths and some of the strange life that lived so deep they never saw life.

But they were small things, mostly. Suitable for that deadly pressure, that brackish life in shadow. No monstrous snake could sleep there, not without being crushed. It didn’t work.

“It doesn’t work _at all_ ,” he said to the tiny, jewel-green snake rustling in the weeds inches away from his face. He laid on his belly, pretending to be a snake in a black tunic himself. If asked directly, he would say _of course_ _I’m not expecting an answer from it about its big creepy cousin_ , but deep down he thought it would be _awfully_ neat if he could talk to the snake. “It wouldn’t have enough to eat, because even magical things need energy to sustain themselves. It wouldn’t get enough movement, it doesn’t have any reason for its existence-“

Well, according to those weird human books Mother had showed him, _those_ people had some funny ideas about a trickster called Hveorungr, which sounded like a rotten name. Trickster gods should have better ones, like _his_ name. Maybe he could play with the humans someday, give them a better story.

Anyway, supposedly this god had birthed the snake, which was some hot auroch poopie.

“Auroch _poop_ ,” he whispered to his new friend the grass snake, quickly looking around to see if anyone had heard the prince say a bad swear. Only the snake had, and at the puff of his breath, it lifted its narrow head and tasted the air between them with its knife-quick tongue. Loki smiled at it with his chin rested low on his hands, admiring the creature’s gold eyes. Small like him. Quicker, too.

The snake slithered closer, curious now, and not afraid of him. Loki took one of his hands off his chin and laid it down next to the little animal, laughing delightedly when it curled up around his warm wrist. He sat up with it still curled around his hand and petted its tiny, arrow-shaped head with a gentle finger.

The snake seemed content with that.

“Do you want to see my room?”

The snake, who was just a snake and much more interested in being warm and safe and maybe eating a bug or five at some point, squeezed gently. He was getting a good hit of sun and a drape of warm tunic sleeve, like a woolen cave, to snuggle in. He was up for anything, so long as he had that.

Loki got up and ran off towards the castle, careful to keep his new friend safe.


	3. Sketchy

3\. Sketchy

. . .

Loki slammed the door of the obligatory rental car shut with a touch more force than necessary. It rocked on its wheels, but not as much as it might’ve in other situations. Jemma, who had been equally annoyed with the bizarre amount of locked-up evening traffic on their route north, didn’t so much as flinch at the car’s squeaks of protest. It was understandable, really. Pittsburgh drivers were as mad as Londoners. And what was with those ridiculous left turn habits they had?

“How many idiots did I nearly T-bone?” asked Loki, echoing her thought.

“I stopped counting after the third. My god. Thank you for not accepting my offer to drive, I would have lost my bloody mind.” She slipped her tablet into a large, ordinary purse that was next slung over her shoulder. The grey feathers were classic city pigeon, which was expected. It still carried a tang of disappointment. The woods were lovely, dark and deep, as the poem went, but the sky was silent, and that made the skin on the back of her neck prickle a little. “Eerie out here.”

“We did just make a solid amount of noise arriving. The locals are probably assessing the situation.” He made his voice light, joking without teasing. “We interrupted the weekly club meeting of rural cryptids, and the secretary has to find their place in the notes.”

She shot him a look, which he returned blandly. Then she set her attention on the forest ahead of her. There were a few paths through the brush; while the place _was_ dark and eerie, they were near a visitor’s lodge and these were where walking paths cut through into the deeper forest. Safe trails, though not meant for evening visitors like them. “I suppose my first question is why someone was out here to see something in the first place. Weren’t park rangers, I expect.”

“No.” Loki didn’t seem like he was about to elucidate further, leading them a few yards down one of the paths.

She had no idea if this route was specified in the report or if he was trusting his instincts. “Who were they?”

“And spoil the surprise?” He turned and looked at her, his eyes twinkling in a way Jemma didn’t like.

Oh, she wasn’t going to play this game. “Yes, and spoil the surprise. Who were they?”

He clutched his chest theatrically. “Ah, thus fails the grand show.” He let go. “Two men in their twenties made our fifth report. Their names don’t matter. Their DUI arrest later that same night is a bit more relevant.” He watched her go blank. “They claimed to the county police that their journey to full inebriation was only begun after their encounter, due to the shock they suffered. But the implication left in the official report is that they were already half sheeted when they teetered into the woods.”

She thought about the vague reports that had sent them to the river’s edge. And now here they were. In the woods. In what wasn’t the dead of night, but they were going to be there for it. “How in God’s name did this end up on your desk?”

“Well, their version of the report was fairly compelling. Also I think Agent Voynitch in Dispatch hates me.” He sighed. “And this was the one with the sketch appended. They seemed quite insistent on feeling watched.”

“The sketch?” She blinked, recalling it. A penciled doodle with some red pen scratched high into the thick, odd torso to imply eyes. “ _That_ thing?”

“One of the men drew it three days later.” Loki yawned. “The orderly kept it, put it in his file. I almost threw it out, then found myself re-examining it when I saw in our report why they’d bothered to include it.”

Was he being confusing on purpose? “Orderly? Do you mean deputy, Loki?”

“I do not. I’m quite well aware of the difference.” That _tone_ came back. He was dead set on some little game of his.

“Loki,” said Jemma. She spoke his name in the way her grandmother had whenever someone in the family had gotten on her last thin nerve, clipped and cool and resolute. It wasn’t a voice that came out of Agent Jemma Simmons terribly often, but it was a sound that said, clearly, _oh you are going to **get it** young man_. Though ‘it’ was never defined, it was forever something nobody wanted.

Loki was more durable than most, but he still rolled his gaze over to her, calculating the width of the boundary he was pushing on. He sighed, giving up. “You sounded just like my third tutor. Histories. I expect she witnessed most of it. She was about a billion years old and feared no one and no thing. She snapped at Odin once because he’d interrupted our studies and he simply… let her. Terrifying woman, actually.”

She gestured at him to get back to his point.

“I said orderly because I meant orderly. The two men were released from the drunk tank on meagre bail and personal recognizance, as good ol’ boys may be. The sheriff said they were too subdued to be trouble. The younger one ended up in a 72 hour psychiatric hold the next day. He had been screaming in the night about the thing in the woods. He broke and ran when his wife tried to wake him, locked himself in the garage weeping until the police collected him and took him to a hospital. He drew his Mothman sketch on 8 milligrams of haloperidol during his second day in the ward.”

Jemma stared. The drug he’d named was used as an injected anti-psychotic in emergency situations, and it had been given at the maximum daily dosage. The poor young man must have been dangling at the very end of his wits. “Dear god,” she murmured. She passed by him, walking down the moonlit path a few yards with her palms pressed together. “So there’s something to the reports after all. Not just osprey.”

“Perhaps. There’s ruined steel, abandoned mines, haphazard pipes and barely buried utility lines all throughout this region. I did a little reading, it’s still quite possible the poor fellow took sick from something mundane. Heard the other tales of things in the sky and his injured mind and body did the rest. You’ve seen the signs about, watch out before digging. There’s plenty under our feet here that might’ve caused an acute attack of _something_.”

She studied Loki, her brow knitting together in a look of contemplative worry. That was a sensible bit of cynicism and she couldn’t fault it. But still… a sudden psychotic attack in what was very likely an otherwise stable individual. “Were you able to pull the young man’s medical record?”

Loki shook his head. “Without a solid basis for a court order or whatlike, it was not going to happen via legal means. I declined to ask Daisy for assistance. Perhaps a mistake on my part, but since I’m still unconvinced of the situation’s genuine merit, I thought it would be rude.”

“That’s fair enough.” Still… She wandered further down the path, still thinking. Movement in front of her made her stop abruptly. “Oh!”

“Are you all right?”

She backed up, a basic human reaction. “There’s a little snake on the trail, it startled me, is all.”

His presence loomed as he caught up to her, then stepped forward towards the snake. “Only a garter. There’s deadlier around, but this one’s no threat,” he said with simple authority. She knew it was harmless, too, but he wasn’t trying to be overbearing. Snakes and spiders, both easily caused an innate human reaction. Then he crouched down, getting closer yet. The snake didn’t seem inclined to dart away.

Loki put his hand down near the creature, and Jemma saw a faint smile curve at the corner of his mouth when it licked out a tongue to taste the air near him. Then it slithered a few inches closer. He wrapped his hand gently around the snake just behind its head and pulled it up. The rest of the snake peaceably wrapped around his arm as he straightened up.

He was petting it along its skull, behind its eyes, as he turned to her. “Don’t tell the flerken. She’ll be upset I didn’t bring her a living toy.”

Jemma looked into the snake’s half-lidded eyes. Was it _enjoying_ the attention? “Animals and children, you’re good with both.”

He snorted derisively, ignoring the compliment as she knew he would. “And have _you_ seen anything odd, my good local serpent? Hmm?”

The snake, a humble garter who had eaten two jolly fat earthworms earlier and was now quite content to suck up a little body warmth from this large, harmless, tree-animal thing, licked at the air and said nothing. Because it was, as usual, only a snake.

Loki looked at her over the narrowly triangular head. “Maybe he’ll respond to a line-up. Google some cryptid pictures, see if it picks out our Mothman.”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“Mothperson, why are we making assumptions, anyway? If it’s extra-dimensional, perhaps it’s evolved past basic biological tagging systems.” He grinned and bent to release the snake. It slithered, a little unwillingly, off his arm and across the low stump Loki was next to. A second later it slipped into a patch of night-black tall weeds and disappeared. “Enjoy your worms and your crickets, little one.”

She had a fair slate of useful tech doodads on her. If he was right… “How far down the path did the two get? I can monitor for anything biological or chemical in the environment, now that I know that’s a possibility.”

“Of course,” said Loki, as if that had been his plan all along, right up to timing when he was going to drop this useful informational nugget. Because it was, naturally. “It’s not much farther. They were near a pond, and I faintly hear it already.”

. . .

Jemma shook her head, her third water-sample coming back clean. Well, relatively clean. There were some trace metals she didn’t like although they weren’t at dangerous levels, and a little chlorine, and she wagered if she tested for microplastics she’d go to bed angry. But there was nothing truly out of whack and she said so.

“Osprey and a bad six-pack. Have you _seen_ the local flavors of beer? They’re depressing,” said Loki cheerily.

“It puts us back at nothing.”

“So it does. Feverish imaginations and one poor man’s bad day. Well, SHIELD paid for the hotels for another few days and I haven’t finished ripping on the state of the city’s cuisine. Thai tomorrow, or something more unique? I was thinking about picking up a side job writing snobbish articles for a gastronomy magazine, they’d _love_ me.”

“You don’t need the money nor the encouragement, Loki.” She put the thin, thermometer-style meter back in its holster, wrapping her garbage neatly in a baggie. “And you thought dinner today was fine.”

“ _That_ was, yes.” He was undeterred by his caught exaggeration. “But the beer-“

“Oh, stop.” She holstered the gadget and squinted across the black, brackish pond. “You’re disappointed, so you’re being particularly irreverent.”

“Oh no, I grow predictable, oh dear, I shall have to come up with something terrible to restore my reputation,” Loki deadpanned.

“Not today you won’t. You already admitted it earlier, and you know nobody outside of SHIELD would believe us if we told your enemies you got all emotional and relatable on certain things, and it’s the ass of night and you’re depressed there’s no strange beasties, and further, you know I wouldn’t give you up anyway.”

“…Ouch,” he said, in a quieter tone that said she’d earned the point that, deep down, he’d allowed her to score. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, as he did, and he watched what was probably a bat skim the water’s surface for bug snacks. “I made you swear.”

“You did. To be honest, I’m a bit sad myself. Not even the fabled osprey, which would have at least made the trip worthwhile.” Jemma sighed. The bat winged off again, presumably with a mouthful of its winnings.

“They are daylight creatures only,” said someone behind her in a voice as clear as the lake.

Jemma turned and saw a glimpse of a tall, slender figure. Her analytical mind instantly connected the profile to the shape she’d seen at the riverside ruins, but it was eclipsed by some massive shadow before she could make out the face. It took a flutter of rapid blinking to realize the world itself hadn’t gone dark. Loki had moved between her and the new arrival in a soundless rush, which told her plenty. None of it good.

“You should not be here,” said the figure, as if from far away. The tone of voice was mechanically neutral, without threat or explanation. The effect was frightening, and almost alien.


	4. Slither

4\. Slither

. . .

Handmaiden Ranveig was proud to have been in the Queen’s service for fifteen years and she hoped to serve for many decades yet to come. As the princes were too young yet to require dedicated staff beyond their tutors, she and the other queen’s maidens often shared the duty of attending to the princes. This was a grand honor, for they both held the future of Asgard in their young hands, and this morning was the first time she was assigned to oversee morning duties for Prince Loki. She had been honored to serve Prince Thor last month, and he had been a bit of a whirlwind. A heavy sleeper, whose rooms were kept as messy as he could get away with.

The younger prince already had a fastidious reputation, and was apparently extremely polite. She’d seen the boy at table, of course, and he seemed quiet and kind enough to support these stories, so she looked forward to a smooth morning. She was already drafting her report to the Queen in the back of her mind. No troubles, a good boy, a clean room, and off to breakfast without a hitch.

The hall guard let her through with a nod. The prince’s rooms should be open. They would earn the right to close or even lock their doors in a few years yet. A polite knock on the wood and a bow of her head as she slipped through was protocol at this stage.

Ranveig swept into the room to the sound of the young prince giggling, and was pleased he was already up and about. Then she lifted her head and began screaming.

_Screaming_.

The hall guard came charging in, and caught her mid-tumble, marble-white and horrified, in his arms.

. . .

Prince Loki sat sullenly on the pile of cushions he’d thrown onto his windowseat, and he didn’t look at the guards gingerly collecting another handful of tiny snakes from the huge crystal bowl Loki had liberated from the kitchens. Frigga sat on a stool just out of her son’s reach, her elbow resting on his little desk as she regarded him with a fond, if bemused, expression.

“I didn’t _know_ she was so scared of snakes.” Loki kicked out an ankle, looking at the green, tattered fringe along the edge of his boot. He would outgrow them soon, so Frigga hadn’t bothered to order replacements yet. “She screamed like she was going to die.”

“You brought in quite a lot of them. It might have surprised anyone, my son. It’s only a poor coincidence that Lady Ranveig has a phobia. That’s not your fault.”

“They’re my friends,” said Loki, stubbornly. He kicked his other ankle, seven years old and full of defensive vigor. “They like me.”

“And they seemed quite fond of you, too,” said Frigga, who knew better than to outline that what they liked was a warm young boy who was bringing them crickets and other tasty offerings without any effort of their own. The overflowing bowl had been on a big desk Loki pulled over to where the sun hit his room the longest, and they had been happy and lazily baking in the heat. “But they’ll be happier yet outside, where you can go visit them.”

Loki stayed silent at this, not arguing, though Frigga could tell he wanted to. He threw glances her way, like… well, she thought, amused, like a snake tasting the air. She smiled back, and inspiration struck her when he looked away again.

He had a cup full of cheap but good brushes, because he liked to paint his letters in big, ornate scrawls that turned into little cartoons and gangly, unusual animals. She plucked a clean one out and let it dance along her fingers until his attention came wandering back her way.

Then, with a green, glittering light spraying across her fingertips, the brush became a jewel-bright green and gold snake prettier than all the rest she’d seen this morning - and that was quite a few, indeed. His eyes widened at the illusion, and he reached his hand out in curiosity.

The jeweled brush-snake slipped from her hand to his, just like real. “But…” he said, doubtfully.

“No, she isn’t real. But what she represents to you is very real, a way of keeping your friends with you whenever you want, and without scaring people around you.” She reached out and put her cool hand around his small one, showing his fingers how to weave the illusion. The snake turned from brush to beast and back again, and once Loki had it down, it coiled neatly in his palm and lifted its little head up to lick towards his eyes. Because that’s what he would have liked best, from his animal friends. “I’ll teach you more soon. Would you like that?”

“Yes, Mother, very much,” said Loki with an earnestness that hurt. He was already ahead of his age in simple runes, he would take to illusions like a fish in a quick stream. He was a good, curious boy. Frigga couldn’t imagine him becoming anyone else, ever.

. . .

“It’s a public park,” said Loki, and his tone was pure arctic ice. Jemma would swear she could _feel_ his aura. He had been somehow caught by surprise by this enigmatic figure, and he didn’t like it a single bit.

_There’s no one around but us, Agent Simmons,_ came the echo. But he’d believed her. Now the unwanted proof was here for them both.

“Public,” Loki continued, “And we are on an official matter.”

“Yes,” said the figure. Jemma peered around Loki’s arm, seeing a narrow, white face that grinned in some strange, inane echo of Loki’s own. He seemed shrouded in some personal shadow of his own, and there was something about that eerie face that she couldn’t put a finger on. “But you are necessary elsewhere.” The voice was still cold, devoid of any human emotion. “Others have not listened. You have come. So you must listen.”

Loki took a step towards the strange man. Jemma grabbed his arm on reflex, knowing her human strength had no hope of stopping him. It was like grabbing a telephone pole, all alien muscle under the soft wool of his jacket. He stopped anyway. “Are you threatening us?” he asked instead, deceptively mild.

“No,” said the figure, and a trace of emotion could be heard this time. Just a trace, like a phantom odor of puzzlement. “Only a warning.”

Something rustled in the deep woods, a doe stumbling through a brush or a raccoon looking for stray leavings. The figure seemed to tremor where he stood, and for a moment he was insubstantial somehow. There, but not. He stepped backwards, deeper into shadow, but that paper-white face glowed like the moon. “Go back to the city. Now.” The face shivered again, and for a moment Jemma thought she saw it split down the middle. Her mind went blank, as if reversing itself and erasing everything in the last two seconds. “There’s still time for you to be where you need to be.”

The shadows deepened into something strange, and then it was gone. On the wind, she heard the word _please_.

“Let’s go,” she whispered to Loki. Something about her mouth felt strange. “Let’s do what he - it said.”

His head tilted low, silently agreeing.

. . .

Jemma dabbed at her bottom lip with a napkin she’d left in the glove compartment from a roadside stop on the way into town. She’d bitten partially through it, and she suspected she knew when. The face, splitting. And whatever she’d made herself instantly forget. “That wasn’t a ghost.”

“No,” said Loki, curtly. She didn’t take it personally. He was rattled, and he wasn’t hiding it. That frightened her more than the incident itself. She thought nothing of how fast he was driving. “No there was… nothing there. I checked every layer of reality I could before we left the woods.”

Left - they’d done everything but bolt at Olympic speeds. They hadn’t said a word after she suggested leaving, and he’d stayed behind her, watching for anything else strange. There had been a _compulsion_ to leave, something that grew in the woods and pressed against them until they’d made it to the car. But that hadn’t really been there, either. Had it?

“I felt pushed,” she said, not knowing how to describe it. “Like…” She stopped, failing. Compulsion wasn’t all of it, either.

“Like a hunch you couldn’t deny.”

“Yes!” She lunged forward against her seatbelt. That was precisely it. Now she could find the words. “Like a man about to get on an airplane, who can’t resist getting a coffee even though he’ll miss his plane. And he does, and the plane crashes. And it turns out there were quite a few of them getting coffee, or hung up in traffic. More than usual, and they survived.” She felt him look at her. “It’s oddly a real phenomena. Something _more_ than the human hunch, as if… oh, I don’t know. A tickle of fate somehow.” She looked at the bloody napkin in her hands. “I prefer being rational, like you. It’s scientific. But… Maybe it’s nothing but evolved awareness, but sometimes we trust our instincts even when there’s nothing visible, and we survive anyway.” She flushed.

“Nonetheless, your first guess was a ghost.”

She coughed a laugh, fully aware that they were specifically not talking about the forest, and the man that very obviously wasn’t a man. It was an excuse, a welcome one. “I saw one once.”

“Did you?” He laughed, but not at her. “In a business context, have to flash your credentials?”

“No, no.” She chuckled, too. “No, I was twelve, at a sleepover with a couple of other girls. Most of us lived in ordinary flats, but she… Mary… she had a nice old house over on the West End. And she used to tell us it was haunted at school. And little girls, you know, eventually it’s put up or shut up. So we came over, and we drank chocolate and got sugared up and… Well, I don’t know.” She petered off, remembering what she saw, and feeling silly anyway.

“Go on.”

She shrugged. “We stayed up till midnight. Mostly nothing, of course. We’d been watching scary movies, and her mum made cupcakes. But, well. Twelve thirty came around, and it was like being in the woods just now. That hunch, like something wasn’t right here. We got quiet. Two of other girls buried under the blanket and Mary was whispering about how she could… feel it… so close…”

. . .

_Jemma is twelve and already highly logical. Sasha and Gail are quivering under the blankets, making boo! noises at each other and not peeking out, because then they can pretend there’s nothing going on. Mary is quiet. So quiet that she gives off those weird adult vibe parents get when a kid’s about to get hurt. And Mary is grabbing her arm, ignoring the other two girls fooling around just a foot away._

_Neither of them could take their eyes off the open doorway. The sensation builds and builds, and for a long time afterward Jemma ignores the memory. Car lights (but there’s no window) or someone else awake in the house (Mary’s dad is snoring so much), or just a child’s tricky memory._

_Later, much later, she acknowledges that she saw something that science did not give her explanations for._

_It’s a glimmer in the doorway. Vertical, spreading into something not quite ordered enough to be a cylinder, and it is, in fact, tall enough to be a person. The glimmer doesn’t reach the carpet runner in the old wooden hallway, and it reflects against nothing. But little Jemma feels it, feels something like sadness and being as heavy as an anchor, and she buries her face in Mary’s shoulder until it goes away again. It takes minutes that feel like hours. The feeling is what lingers. The haunting wasn’t actually the glimmer, it was that sorrowful weight. Like drowning._

_In the morning there are pancakes and cartoons, and no one talks about the ghost Jemma and Mary felt. They share a look, and they never speak of it again. Except once._

. . .

“Mary called me over to visit before they moved. It was a couple of years later, and I was going away to school again myself. Her parents were out, finishing some documents on the new home, but I came over, and right away by the look on her face I knew it was about _that_.

“She took me over to the base of the staircase - it went straight up to the second floor, and the old mosaic-style wool runner had already been packed away, and they were working on the carpet on the main floor. Having it redone, for the eventual buyer. And she went over, and she carefully pulled at a corner of the carpet, right by where the stairs and the wall met. She had a face while she did it, like it smelled. There wasn’t any odor, of course, but I understood.

“There was old hardwood underneath. Might’ve been nice again if the new owners put in the money to polish it all. But right there, they’d have to replace it. A three by four foot area, just at the bottom of the stairs. It was stained and warped a little. Dark, old stains.” She was looking straight out the car window. “The body had fallen hard, been left there long enough to ruin the wood with its…” She stopped. “I pulled the history of the property when I was in college.”

“Yes?” Loki was quiet.

She remembered the microfiche articles as if they were in her hand right then. “He pushed her down the stairs. A young man and his grandmother, his legal guardian. 1889. They didn’t find the body for days. He’d taken all the valuables, anything he could sell, and left. No idea what happened to him after. The property sold for cheap once it was carpeted. No one stayed in it long.” She stared up at the stars in the sky. “Mary’s family lived it in for only three years.”

“Is the home still there?”

“I’m sure of it. It’s probably a rental by now. Bed and breakfast, a steal if you stay more than four nights.” Another brittle, nervous laugh. “Why are we ‘ _necessary_ ’ in the city? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’s something to do with all of those bridges? Is it going to be like the Silver Bridge years ago?”

Frustration grated at Loki’s teeth. “I don’t know.” He looked at her for a moment, and in the dark there was no color in his eyes at all. “The face. What did you see?”

“It split. I don’t remember anything after that.” She didn’t, but she had another memory in its place. “There’s a movie I saw once. A horror movie. It was about bugs, one of my friends made me go see it.”

Loki looked at her again.

“I don’t remember much, it wasn’t very good. Very Hollywood. But there were pieces of it that stuck with me, I think because they weren’t as cynically polished. The bugs had mutated, because they had been made to help stop a viral disease but went rampant.” She furrowed her brow, thinking. “They got quite large. They could mimic - _that_ was the name of the movie, I’d forgot - and sometimes people saw large figures with faces that weren’t quite right. That’s how the bugs were moving around by the end. They could mimic us well enough to survive.”

He said nothing.

“That face was just like that. I didn’t see what was underneath. But the face wasn’t real.” She frowned. Or she had seen and it was forgotten. She didn’t want to talk about that. “But… there wasn’t anything there, anything at all.”

“That I could sense.” Loki pulled onto a bridge, Already reaching the inner city. He’d had his foot hard on the pedal. She looked out at the river water below and shivered. “I am rapidly reassessing what that means.”

“It’s quiet. Late.” She sighed. “Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe I missed a chemical trace and we just tore out of the woods, scared about nothing.”

“That’s obviously not the case.” That curt tone was back. He was upset again. “It might’ve affected you, but not me. No, we were warned. Vaguely.”

“Maybe that’s all it knows how to do. Maybe it’s not something we can really understand.”

“ _Maybes_.” He hissed the word, increasingly pissed and undoubtedly at himself. She understood, let it go. “We’ll go back to the woods tomorrow. In daylight. Sort this _out_.”


	5. Sinkhole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part one of today's finale

5\. Sinkhole

. . .

The hotel was a nice one, there in the downtown triangle of Pittsburgh. It was 3 AM, the hour of the wolf, and high on the VIP floor there was one suite with all of the lights on. Loki was not asleep, and neither was Jemma, who had been trawling websites that still had that 1990’s aesthetic for the last two hours. She’d shown up at his door, knowing full well he was awake, and sure as hell _she_ wasn’t sleeping. Better to work. Pretend to work, anyway.

“They call it Indrid Cold,” said Jemma, scanning the shoddy web page. “Dispatch didn’t bother adding it to the profile, because of one of its cross-references. They’re automatically jettisoned, it’s a routine in the system.”

“Which reference?” Loki was staring balefully into his cup of tea. He’d made it special, rifling through one of his magical ‘pockets’ for what he called travel necessities, which she supposed white porcelain-marble cups with Asgardian gold trim with matched tea steepers in similarly hand-woven gold counted. Did make a damn good cup of tea, some special blend his mother had favored. “Is it going to make me angry?”

“The men in black.” She looked at him from over a laptop resting on her crossed legs. “Secret investigators that cover up strange and terrible things. Us, basically. They think what we saw in the woods is one of us.”

He went blank.

She grimaced. “Early days of SHIELD, sometimes our attempts to keep a populace calm while clearing things up didn’t go so well. And, you know, we’ve had our issues.”

“Nick Fury is a charming and likable individual, I don’t know _why_ seeing him arrive on a contested scene in an oddly silent black helicopter would make a civilian assume the worst,” Loki deadpanned, making her realize that he did sort of understand the problem here. “So our esteemed _co-worker_ Indrid Cold gets seen oft in conjunction with the Mothman, is a strange, grinning fellow in dark suits who answers things only obliquely and is oddly terrifying in his vague but insistent inhumanity - my _gods_ , I finally understand what it’s like for humans to meet me.” He covered his face with his hand.

“I was not going to say.”

“But you thought it,” he said accusingly, muffled by his palm. “I am brought low by humility once again.”

She gave a tiny, apologetic shrug. “Anyway, this writer John Keel claims he saw Cold while he was investigating the Mothman. It was Cold that seemed to, I don’t know, interpret the warnings the monster was trying to offer the region. Keel is the one that coined the phrase ‘men in black,’ incidentally. Keel didn’t really understand, and it all ended at the failed Silver Bridge. Keel published his book a few years later, and the bridge was chalked up to some malfunction.”

“Some of that was in the report I received, yes. But you’re right, nothing about this other nonsense.” Loki took his hand away from his face. “I still expect it’s _still_ mostly nonsense.” He put the hand up when she started to protest. “Keel’s work sounds, frankly, idiotic. But all right, let’s square that with the reports from witnesses, and these other indications of our strange visitor. There’s an overlap between these two cryptic entities, and a series of mysterious visitations and warnings and -“ He paused, lifting his head as if he heard something.

“Loki?”

He stayed still for a moment, frowning. “Thought I felt… well. There’s etheric tremors I associate with earthquakes. But we’re not on a faultline here.” He looked at her and picked his tea up for a sip. “Nerves. I’m on edge, you’re on edge.” He looked into the cup and then set it down quickly. There were ripples in it, and now his feet seemed to tingle from within. He reached a hand out towards her, all his thoughts directed immediately into survival mode. It was _not_ his nerves. “Get up, now.”

A massive cracking noise seemed to come from everywhere. Jemma bolted off the couch and towards Loki, who pulled them both into a doorframe by the kitchen. If need be, he could teleport them both safely. Her eyes traveled to the window, as if she might somehow see whatever was going on. She found a crack in the wall that hadn’t been there a moment ago, fine as a hair but running from the floor to the corner of the window. “Loki-“

Another rippling sound. Reality fluttered and she shut her eyes on reflex, gasping when the cool autumn air whipped into her face. He’d jumped them, then. No hesitation, and that told her a lot. Now she could hear some awful creaking sound, popping now and again like an explosive device. And, distantly, the rush of surging water. “Oh my god,” she gasped, holding onto his arm for dear life and now terribly frightened. “Oh my god, what is it, oh my _god_.”

“Sinkhole.” Loki sounded stricken. “It’s absolutely massive. The hotel-“ He cut himself off, the implication dire.

Jemma opened her eyes and found herself atop another hotel that had been across the street from theirs. The building they were in only seconds ago had gone impossibly crooked and her gaze went down to the pretty little open park with its gurgling fountains. The fountains were now going, going, surging, with brackish green and brown water overflowing like every toilet on Earth was under siege. The park looked completely flooded out. There were the tiny dots of people running in all directions, and cars that didn’t look right anymore-

_because they’re partially underground already, oh my god, Jemma, this thing is already half a block wide!_

As her thoughts rippled, the sinkhole yawned wider, and she watched a part of their hotel break off and fall into the growing pit. Heavy bricks and white ceramic decorations, all of them thudding down, down, and the people were running but not fast enough and-

“Get us down there,” her own voice said, as if from some far away all-business Jemma summoned to new duty. “We need to get people sorted and evac’d - _oh_!” He had them on ground level before she even finished her sentence, her stomach looping around itself, nauseated by the unearthliness of teleportation magic.

She let go of him, her mind already calculating the current danger range of the sinkhole. Without knowing the causes underneath, there were too many variables to be certain of much. But she could at least keep an idea of their limits in mind, based on the local geography, the width of the road, etcetera. Sirens filled the air and she whipped around, seeing the cops arrive. She charged at them, her SHIELD credentials pulled and raised high so they could clearly see the badge. “Federal agent!” she barked at the large cop emerging from the driver’s side.

“Ma’am,” he tried, not convinced that she was in charge of the scene.

Jemma wasn’t having it. “We don’t know how fast this is going to worsen, but with the fountain water rushing and the pipes I can hear underneath, I can tell you it _is_ going to worsen. We need a full evacuation of every building in a two block radius of the hole itself. Power needs to be cut to this entire area. You need to wake up Municipal to figure out what is underneath so we can estimate the worst case scenario, and we need to do that _now_. Get fire and rescue on the scene-“

“I’ve got the first line of cars. Hotels next,” called Loki before disappearing.

“The _fuck_ ,” said the cop, staring at the place Loki used to be. If he’d turned around, he would have seen Loki dropping off a frightened and very wet late night Uber driver on a stable-looking street corner before disappearing again.

Jemma Simmons grabbed the cop across his chest, the sheer force of her authority flowing through her eyes and boring through his soul. “Don’t worry about him, look at me. He can’t do all of this himself. You need to cut off traffic to this area right now, and tell people to pull their vehicles out. No more weight than necessary, it won’t change much but it may slow the growth. Are you listening to me?”

The cop stared over her shoulder. A piece of city park broke apart and fell into the hole. Water splashed up, sludgy and stinking. “Jesus.” He seemed to collect himself and went back to his car. She watched him pull the radio and begin rapping something into it. All she could assume was that he was following her command.

Loki whipped by, dropping a federal-looking windbreaker on her shoulder before disappearing again. He was wearing one himself, looking like a particularly eccentric but familiar-style fed. A trustworthy figure in an emergency. She flicked a glance at the hotel while she shrugged it on, pulling her night-messy hair into a slick ponytail. An illusion, yes, cheap and effective. She supposed she understood the value of them quite well, after all.

. . .

Twenty minutes was all it took for the sinkhole to consume the entire park next to their hotel. Loki had long since finished the evacuation of their hotel, and people had stopped being foolish enough to linger outside. Jemma heard him shouting people out the door, teleporting those who couldn’t move quickly for any reason. He’d bothered to grab their luggage once the building was clear, dropping the few bags inelegantly near what Jemma had decided was their personal staging area. The building itself, some historical landmark in its own right, was ruined. Parts of it had sloughed away down the sinkhole, too heavy and shattered to be easily recovered. The rest hung crooked, balanced haphazardly on wet, sunken earth.

The police followed her orders. Two other hotels and the nearby Greyhound facility were all cleared out. Every business had been checked for night and early morning staff, and the buses had been rerouted. Now Loki was halfway down the pit himself, looking like he was surfing a huge piece of broken asphalt. Below him was an ancient sewer pipe, its concrete case shattered like a WWII bomb shell. It wasn’t the only reason for the sinkhole, but once it joined in the festivities, it did its part with flair.

Loki had forced its flooding surge into a trickle, but the strain on his face was telling. Ice clogged the pipes, on the logic that backing up the sewage lines until the water company got things under control was going to be better than a third of downtown completely washing away. The engineering crew the city sent were frightened of him, badly, but kept at their business of trying to stabilize the sinkhole. There were other pipes below, but they were intact so far. There were signs of another ‘void’ on the edge of the current sinkhole, a place where time and erosion had primed another disaster, but now they might get a chance to shore that up, too, before it made the current hole possibly twice as large.

Jemma was used to the glare of emergency LED lanterns at this point, running off the firetrucks parked well away from the heart of the disaster. She was staring at her new temporary ‘partner,’ the city liaison and current emergency manager. “I’m sorry, what?”

“No major casualties,” said the woman, sounding dazed. There was a clipboard and an iPad clasped in her arms. A phone beeped regularly from somewhere on her person, a ceaseless scroll of texts and phone messages. The music of a critical situation. “I don’t know how. We’ve got some bumps, scrapes, two fractures at UPMC. But no one’s critical, and so far there’s no signs of missing. No bodies in recovery. Every car below is clear.” She laughed, and that sounded shaky, too. “Ma’am, if you two hadn’t been here, I would not get to say that. I can’t… God bless you for being here.”

“The damage to the city…” Jemma looked at the ruins of the park, a pretty green space that yesterday had been thronged with street musicians and chatty pedestrians. She had wanted to eat a little lunch there before they left. One final picnic before winter came.

“Is something we can repair.” The emergency manager rolled her eyes, leaning in conspiratorially. “It’s going to take a long time, and we’ve got some people that are going to grip onto the money we need until the eagle screams, but we’ll do it. But not losing anyone, that’s a freakin’ miracle.”

_A miracle_. Jemma found a swallow sticking in her throat. _You’re necessary elsewhere_.

“Sometimes we find ourselves right where we need to be,” she finally said, her mind feeling like it was floating away.

“Whatever power put you here,” said a woman that had probably never heard of the Mothman or its humanoid messenger, “I can’t thank them enough.” She turned her head at the sound of triumphant shouts from the sinkhole. “Let’s find out what they’ve got.”


	6. Epilogue: Softer Autumns

Epilogue: Softer Autumns

. . .

Jemma still felt drained. She’d slept most of yesterday, sheltered in a new hotel half a mile from the stabilized disaster area, but she fully planned on taking a couple personal days to finish recovering when they got back to base. With their cryptid hunt having been turned into emergency federal assistance and logistics, Coulson had, with some subtle urging from Loki, signed off on calling their original assignment complete.

She’d overheard his call the night before, with his careful ‘I don’t want to talk about it yet’ tone, and went back to dozing over a thick pile of environmental information culled from the site, unwilling to ask why he’d had a change in attitude. She suspected she knew, anyway.

Still dozy, she pulled herself a bit more upright in the passenger seat and squinted out the window. “I thought we’d be on the freeway by now,” she murmured, confused. They were driving through some old neighborhood, pretty brick houses high along hillsides, with lawns speckled with orange and red leaves fallen from trees with plenty left to shed. The car turned onto a old-fashioned road, still pebbled with bricks. “What is this?”

He didn’t answer for a moment, focusing his attention on an easily missable driveway, marked with an open gate. Once they were through, he began slowing the car. “With one park washed away, I thought of looking for another one. You seemed quite fond of the idea of a quiet picnic lunch before leaving the city.”

“I was, but, well, things happened.” She felt like she still hadn’t caught up. Was this another of his little pranks?

“And they were not as dire as they could have been.” Loki parked the car and got out. She turned, watching him rustle through the popped trunk and coming up with a bundle of… was that a _basket_? She blinked rapidly, stumbling out of the car and following him up a gentle green lawn filled with fallen leaves rustling with each breeze. He set down the basket and spread a thick woolen blanket. Asgardian things again, because of _course_ Loki wouldn’t simply jot off to Target if he could mystically lift what he needed out of his old home. “I liberated a few things,” he said, confirming her suspicions. “The food, however, is local.”

The food was ordinary and delicious-looking. He’d gotten a stack of sandwiches, clearly remembering her orders from the past, a variety of snacks, and a bowl of fresh cut vegetables. A simple, light lunch. In a city park. With no disaster looming.

“Loki…” She didn’t know what to say, except the obvious. “Thank you.”

He shrugged it off with his usual diffident politeness and took a sandwich for himself, looking across the green at a statue set at the edge of a pond. “I’m going to think aloud for a few moments. Bear with me. Now. Magic and science have an interesting overlap on certain complicated issues. Neither one quite manages all the answers, so it’s rare to find any consensus, and things get argued about in scholastic halls for centuries. One such concept is _between_. When I refer to it, it’s based in magical theory. A space between realities, a void that touches on concepts the rational mind can’t quite find words for. Here are roads that go to places that, once you set foot there, you realize do not actually exist, and so you wisp away into nothing like a candle. They are risky trails, and though I seem familiar with them, they are _dangerous_. Like nothing else.”

Loki took a bite, musing to himself before continuing. “Now, galactic scientists sometimes theorize this _between_ space as a hyperspace dimension, a folded place between traditional three dimensional space where the usual physics do not apply. It’s a unique part of regular space travel, not that anyone discusses it like so. When starships jump from place to place using the traditional lanes, there’s brief moments where space seems… not quite right. The closest description a mortal mind seems to coalesce around is something of a honeycomb effect. And the ‘walls’ of this honeycomb structure are metaphorically quite thin. They are the places where space itself can breach, and things we do not understand might rarely come through.

“This is where the worst of unreality lurks, these _betweens_. Normally we perceive them as Lovecraftian, impenetrable beings. The cultist issue we had several years ago, where Strange and I realized one of these terrible things was breaking through into our world, this was a being birthed in one of these places between, able to reach out and impact our own reality after millennia of effort.

“Imagine, perhaps, perceiving our reality as a tremulous collection of blurred time. Perceiving disaster, resolution, and prevention all at once, all these possibilities collapsed into what is, for you, a split second. Perhaps you make it a mission to do something about these moments, for whatever reason, for we cannot understand your mind.”

She ate quietly, listening to him.

“Of course, since our perceptions are so fixed on our reality, it’s also possible some of these _between_ places are stable dimensions we can’t perceive by their rules, and so things are quite logical for these beings that see our timestream in more flexible ways.” Loki brushed crumbs off his hands, still looking away. “Our senses aren’t trained for them. How can they be, when their reality is nothing like ours? So imagine encountering them in our reality, even for a second. What does that feel like to someone attuned to a greater spectrum of awareness than many mortals? Would it feel like _nothing_ , because we still don’t have the correct sensory organs?” He smiled, thin and bitter. “Why, I quite think so.”

“The Mothman…”

“Is not a cryptid as we are defining them. It is not a creature of some unknown natural order, for if it were, it would be perceivable as such. Instead, its extradimensional shadow terrified humans as it swept by, as it perhaps scanned these moments of disaster looking for a way to alter time in our reality. And with great effort, that being finds a way to communicate in what is for it maybe a second later, or five minutes before, briefly mimicking the shapes of this world but never feeling real, or present, but feeling… _wrong_. So wrong that our memory erases itself, because that is safer for our mortal mind. Yes, I include mine. Just like there is very little that stays in the memory after that glimpse of honeycomb space, because that is all we can handle.” He looked at her. “Beyond that, there _is_ no answer.”

“But whatever it is, it chooses to help.”

“If it thinks it’s helping, by its metric.” A small, dry laugh. “It’s an eldritch thing, and if it is kindlier than the horrors written of by others, well, that goes to the greater mystery of an impossible universe. Best to leave it there.” He gestured at the snacks he’d brought. Fine chocolates from a place she liked, other treats. “You put up with me, you told a good ghost story, and when disaster struck it was you that took charge of the scene. That saved lives. As I will tell Coulson, life is far more important than riddling out the mysteries of deeper dimensions and the creatures that live there.” An eyebrow arched. “And it may be the only thing that _this_ creature of the between might sympathize with. Leave it in the woods of this world, then. Doing what it may to help, if it helps, when it deems it is time to do so.”

She snacked for a while, thinking all of it over. “But for _you_ , does it count as a cryptid? Did you finally find something strange enough to make up for childhood disappointments?”

He snorted and pulled a knee up to rest his wrist along the top of it. “Miss Simmons, there are so many grand disappointments in my life, it’s going to take a bit more than one mysterious inner-space critter to cheer me up.”

“Brat,” said Jemma, cheerfully.

“It’s a career,” said Loki, and the sardonic brightness at last returned to his voice.

. . .

The final report, which summarized a bug hunt briefly but focused more broadly on Agent Simmons’ efforts to keep a disaster area under rigid control, sat on Loki’s desk. With a final signature and the press of a SEND button, the matter would be closed for good. Coulson’s direct questions were few, and Loki was glad to avoid most discussion.

The thing had unsettled him, deeply, and vastly more than he’d shown. He felt he did understand the _between_ , as much as someone in this reality could claim to, and he knew what paths were safer. The existence of this creature, wrapped in a sliver of separate reality pressed so close to theirs, yet whose true visage was like nothing describable, had upended his understanding. He’d let one lie slip between him and Jemma, but he’d done so with good intent.

Loki _did_ remember what was under ‘Indrid Cold’s’ splitting, inhuman face, if a grey, breaking glimpse. What he saw was not a being that could exist in this world, nor any physical-based layer of reality. It had been made of rich, red, spreading light, like a burning, ceaseless sun boring too close to him as a hapless planetoid. The edges of that light seemed fuzzed, somehow, and he understood, before his mind had shut down and rewound most of what else he’d seen, that this was the fraying of reality where ‘reality’ existed between them.

Perhaps a stressed mind could shape that glimpse into something distantly like a giant moth. Two human eyes straining under that light until it duplicates the illusion, the blurring of reality becoming a grey mass, all of it flying too close to the concept of one’s own soul. Too much for this reality, and at that, only a feathery sliver of the alleged Mothman’s existence.

Loki sat on his old green couch, and in his hands was the pauldron he used to wear when he was at war. It was the first piece of armor he’d had commissioned for himself, and his thumb traced over the raised golden scales of Jormungandr. A smile flickered across his face, remembering the poor handmaiden’s screams when she’d wandered into a seven year old’s ad hoc snake den. Ranveig, that was her name. She’d served the Queen for another decade, but she’d stayed far away from the young prince ever since that morning.

That was around the time Prince Loki first started feeling not a little bit like an animal trapped in the wrong paddock himself. Perhaps her understandable reaction had been a part of it. It didn’t matter, he supposed. He bore her no ill will, even if it had been so.

Jormungandr stared mindlessly up at him. The great serpent’s face was a bit more dragonlike than what he’d had in mind, but it was a good rendition, all the same. The closest it had ever come to being real.

Well, considering what the beast was meant to stand for, perhaps that was for the best. Wearing this very piece of armor, Loki had nigh caused a Ragnarok for more than one world. It was more than enough for him to get the taste for any such further apocalypse out of his system. Let the great serpent sleep in its stories, then.

Reality had more than enough tales for anyone to want. Even himself, reckoned Loki, listening to some younger agent pound through the hall outside on gods-knew-what sort of personal mission.

Then he remembered, coming the rest of the way out of his memories. He and Jemma were back in time for the annual festival of gluttony and sugar shock, a childish holiday of cheap spooks and bad movie marathons. Secretly, he decided he very much enjoyed the stupid human holiday. It was born of good cheer, and laid atop a bit of well-meant legend he decided he liked. And a good jump scare story about a poor Asgardian lady walking into a room full of fat, happy, and extremely confused snakes would go over quite well this year, he reckoned.

Loki smiled and put the pauldron away on his desk, scratching his signature across the digital tablet and letting the Pittsburgh report be sealed. Frej woke from where she had been sleeping in a waddled up tee of his she’d stolen and gave him a questioning meep. “It’s your first Halloween,” he told her. “Someone might give you a cheesy treat if you want to come along.”

The meep came again, now thoroughly interested in what he had to say. She blinked away the sleepiness and popped over to claw her way up his side and lay across his shoulder. Loki gave her a scritch around her neck, realizing he’d traded his snake for a cat, and had come out rather better for the bargain.

In return for the attention, the young flerken began a deep and throaty purr. One that would only deepen once Coulson started giving her the good belly rubs, with six hours worth of _Hellraiser_ movies going on in the background of a noisy, happy party.

Not a bad holiday, Loki decided. Not bad at all.

_~Fin_

_"We're not allowed to know."_

_~ The Mothman Prophecies_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I write this, I still live in Pittsburgh. That may change soon, but meanwhile I’ve lived in this city for a bit over a decade and never set a fanfic here. I thought it might be fun, and with the Mothman in fact only a few hours away to the south, hey, let’s go all in on what I love for once.
> 
> The locations described in this story are real, and are places I have been. The batshit insane carnivore restaurant with a Flintstones steak on the bone is extremely real and currently surviving under COVID. Jemma and Loki stayed at the Omni William Penn, a landmark four star hotel not far from the Greyhound and Amtrak stations. The park I demolish in the climax is Mellon Green, and its fountains really are quite pretty. Etcetera. And very nearby to all of this on 10th Street was the large sinkhole that opened just before Halloween 2019, eating half a city bus. The image went viral, and city residents adopted the awkward, disastrous sight by promptly immortalizing it in Christmas ornaments and cake decorations.
> 
> Pittsburgh is a weird fuckin’ town, you guys.
> 
> Despite having a record-breaking number of bridges, with most of them in such shitty repair that John Oliver highlighted them during a 2015 infrastructure segment on Last Week Tonight, the growing issue around here is in fact the g’dang sinkholes. The situation is exactly as described in the fic. The city simply does not know what is under most stretches of construction anymore, making updating anything from fiber optics to even decent fucking plumbing a risky venture.
> 
> I’ve liked it here quite a lot, but it is weird and broken in a number of respects, and I could honestly set three more Codex fics here to talk about various social issues and it wouldn’t feel cramped.
> 
> The depiction of Mothman is 80% John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies, 10% hinky internet stories, and 10% me on my usual eldritch bullshit. The interconnection of Mothman with a man in black entity called Indrid Cold is a reported issue, although the one ‘reputable’ picture of a purported Cold looks like a guy on reddit doing his best Jim Belushi. I always pictured more ‘The Man Who Laughs’ crossed with David Cronenberg’s role in the movie Nightbreed.
> 
> The image in my mind of Mothman is the one I saw in a cheap cryptid paperback when I was about young Loki’s age, and it’s the one described by Loki as attached to his files. It is a simple pen and pencil drawing of something that looks like a winged version of Gossamer, that big weird orange bigfoot-looking thing from old Looney Tunes cartoons, but with two huge red eyes set high in its torso. It’s a stupid, small sketch, and it has scared the shit out of me for decades.
> 
> http://www.cryptozoonews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mothman-drawing-1-188x300.jpg
> 
> If the link works, it’s that. Gave me a complex about waking up in the night and seeing giant glowing red eyes in front of my face to this day. If it ever happens, I will honest to god just drop dead. Yeah, I know. The human mind just be like that sometimes, as Loki might say.
> 
> You know what this hellhole of a year is like. The Everett Ross tale went on temporary hiatus so I could focus on this and the insane shitpile my life just turned into. His story will resume soon… but I’m hoping by that point things will have started to look up again.
> 
> Take care of yourselves, VOTE, and be safe. Love you. See you soon. And happy Halloween.
> 
> 10/28/20


End file.
